13 ms·

A Chinese woman wrote millions of words of fake Wikipedia history

326 points by Zuider 4y ago

pombrand 4y ago
I hope she gets her own wikipedia page about this
xbar 4y ago
It begs: how many people find themselves weaving webs of lies in places like Wikipedia to keep their personas/identities intact?
- leephillips 4y ago
  It makes no difference to me, because I don’t read Wikipedia articles. I do use Wikipedia to find references and public domain illustrations, though.
  - King-Aaron 4y ago
    okay
  - eru 4y ago
    Not sure that's relevant? But those illustrations could be full of lies just the same?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kieselguhr_kid 4y ago
This false history is a literary achievement. Writing such a plausible pseudo-account and convincing so many for so long is impressive. I guess they should take it all down but I'm kind of sad that there aren't any comparable projects (note: I'm aware that there are wikis devoted to creating fictional worlds, but these worlds are rarely historically grounded or plausible)
- f38zf5vdt 4y ago
  They are preserved in Wikipedia and ranked according to their longevity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi... There's more or less a competition for them.
  - dbtc 4y ago
    I suppose the real way to win would be to add a fake hoax to that page...
- chaostheory 4y ago
  I’m surprised that she doesn’t publish adapted novels based on her Wikipedia entries. Might be wrong, but both the Twilight series and 50 Shades of Gray series were initially fan fiction pieces by housewives who published their work on blogs. Alternate historical fiction is a very popular genre.
  - semanticist 4y ago
    50 Shades of Grey was Twilight fanfic with the 'serial numbers filed off'. I don't think Twilight itself has fanfic in its origin.
    - memsom 4y ago
      I think Twilight was the first novel from the author and she pretty much wrote a transcript, and got a book deal off the back of it. She had little previous experience in writing novels and was just very, very lucky that it happened to all fall in to place... some first time novelists spend years trying to do what she did.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Not to take away from hard work and talent but breaking into the arts in a big way--after which it's at least somewhat easier--must be, what, 90% luck.
googlryas 4y ago
I hope these articles are just mirrored onto a separate wiki site where more people can jump in and elaborate on the alt-world history that Zhemao started. Unfortunately I can't read Chinese, but I do for some reason find fake but entirely real feeling historical accounts very compelling.
- pilsetnieks 4y ago
  Imagine a traveler from an alternate universe getting fed up by editors constantly rolling back their edit of A to E in Berenstein, and just documenting everything they remember from their prior life.
encryptluks2 4y ago
America has probably rewritten history more times than we'd like to acknowledge. There are some countries that will jail you for questioning the official narratives. I have a feeling America is headed in that direction, one ideology or another.. eventually if you question it you will be labeled some sort of name to elicit the worst reactions from people towards you.
ffhhj 4y ago
What could she do with GPT-3 and DALL-E?
- im3w1l 4y ago
  Gpt-3 does not have the long-term memory required to create a convincing book-length narrative. Not that that's a guarantee that gpt-4 will be thus limited.
elsonrodriguez 4y ago
There was a similar scandal for the Scots wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...
- oefrha 4y ago
  I don’t see any similarity between the scandals beyond the surface level one person generating a lot of content on Wikipedia that was later reversed. Your linked article is about some teenager putting up mistranslated garbage. That’s very boring vandalism, notable only due to its scale. TFA is about someone creating a vast collection of plausible-sounding history out of thin air, which is fascinating and arguably more damaging for Wikipedia.
  - thih9 4y ago
    In both cases people pretended to be experts (history / scots), it worked and large amount of inappropriate articles stayed public a long time.
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    The Scots Wikipedia issue isn't straightforward at all. For one, considering the sheer effort spent in 170 000 edits over a decade, it's quite possible that the editor was acting in severely misguided good faith. More importantly, it raised questions about the utility and proceedings of Wikimedia sites with low traffic; a substantial discussion took place in an RFC[0] that included proposed audits to prevent future incidents, but nothing really went through other than increased attention to the long-existing Small-Wiki Monitoring Team. And the off-wiki effects...poisoned datasets and damage to the language itself! Perhaps proposals from the RFC will be renewed in light of this, though it's not the same situation as the Chinese Wikipedia isn't really small. It's known for questionable circumstances regarding adminship and other user behaviour, though, and is generally quite insular. So, unsurprising that this story hasn't received much attention outside of Chinese Wikipedia or news. On-wiki, the only pages for it currently are that on zhwiki and a corresponding page on English Wikipedia with a brief summary.[1] Also, enwiki's own newspaper has a more informed article on the Scots incident,[2] also with some discussion (there's also an HN post). By the way, I remember an article or Wikipedia page about how journalism about Wikipedia persistently lacks nuance or understanding of its customs (basically a community-wide Gell-Mann amnesia effect), but can't find it now...anyone happen to just know it? [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_scale_language_inaccuracies_on_the_Scots_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_s... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_and_hoaxes_of_Russia_in_2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-08-30/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
partiallypro 4y ago
Forget Wikipedia, how much of history in general is largely made up or fluffed.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  So much of it is that when archaeologists confirm a historical account, it's news. I recall when King Richard's body was dug up under a parking lot, the historians were shocked to discover he really did have a seriously curved spine. They had thought that the accounts of his disability were just propaganda by his enemies.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    No its not news most of the time. The situation you are referencing is an extreme case and that's why it made news, and it happens to be a very well known story with the evidence being literally in the capital city. Seems like you are suffering from an extreme case of survivor bias.
    - WalterBright 4y ago
      It seems whenever I have in-depth knowledge of something, and see a journalist's reporting on it, it's all wrong. For example, I was in a building once when a natural gas leak caused the roof to blow off. I recorded 3 local news casts about it later that evening. They all got major facts completely wrong. They said it was a warehouse (it was an office building). They said the building was cleared before it blew (I was in it when it blew, the firemen never suggested I leave). Another one is the 737MAX crashes. The popular press consistently misrepresents and misreports it. (I've posted about that here many times.) And, quite obviously, the mainstream media in the US has been completely misrepresenting current events. Do you think that's a modern phenomenon? I don't. I suspect it has always been happening, it's just that the internet has exposed it.
      - akolbe 4y ago
        "What people outside do not appreciate is that a newspaper is like a soufflé, prepared in a hurry for immediate consumption. This of course is why whenever you read a newspaper account of some event of which you have personal knowledge it is nearly always inadequate or inaccurate. Journalists are as aware as anyone of this defect; it is simply that if the information is to reach as many readers as possible, something less than perfection has often to be accepted." —David E. H. Jones, in New Scientist, Vol. 26 Relevant in this context inasmuch as many Wikipedia articles are based on press sources.
isopod 4y ago
It’s hard to not see this as Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” come to life. For a hoax, it’s still an impressive feat of fictional world building. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...
est 4y ago
> Zhemao published an apology letter on her English Wikipedia account, writing that her motivation was to learn about history. She also wrote that she is in fact a full-time housewife with only a high-school degree. This is not the full story, she originally said the motive was to win online debates with wikipedia references (created by her alias account)
- trentgreene 4y ago
  What kind of debates?
  - est 4y ago
    Keyword: 贴游 or 文游 Scenario simulations based on eu4, hoi4 battles (possibly with mods), both teams would setoff by a historical event, also external events would affect the progress. It's a somewhat popular online sport & sub-culture in China. People go to extremes for historical "accuracy" or just for the sake of it. Tons of memes are generated without people noticing. In this example, Zhemao can claim something like "I should have extra 2000 silver starting at my castle because check out this wikipedia article". She surely have played many games in her favor. Her apology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%E6%8A%98%E6%AF%9B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%E6%8A%98%E6%AF%9B
- knighthack 4y ago
  Then this article is disingenous, because it did not state it as part of her apology, which would have put some context to it.
livinglist 4y ago
When I was a kid, I enjoyed making up fake history and fake world political map just for fun lol, I also designed flags for each county I came up with. Great time.
hunglee2 4y ago
all history is narrative, with a greater or lesser degree of fidelity to reality. This example should be preserved in some way to remind us of this important fact
throwaway81523 4y ago
I love this. I wish it was in English. It sounds a lot better than the regular Wikipedia.
kthejoker2 4y ago
Borges, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon, and Danilo Kiš would be proud; what else is the world's historical narrative but an edit war? Such a fantastical lie wrapped around such utter banality; surely this will warrant her own Wikipedia article.
spicybright 4y ago
Michael Scott: "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
rvieira 4y ago
A "fictional Wikipedia" seems like a nice project. Something that could grow organically from contributors with an effort to cross-link and cross-reference. Is there anything like this?
- grenoire 4y ago
  SCP Foundation comes to mind https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/ https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/. An entire wiki of a loosely interconnected series of supernatural events and entities. It's very easy to get lost in it.
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    Are they now redirecting (from scp-wiki.net and scpwiki.com) to the Wikidot URL for SEO?
- AndrewOMartin 4y ago
  Uncyclopedia and SCP come to mind.
- shantara 4y ago
  A Sci-Fi version of this is Orion's Arm project: https://www.orionsarm.com/ https://www.orionsarm.com/
- herbst 4y ago
  If you by change understand German, there is https://www.stupidedia.org https://www.stupidedia.org
- altilunium 4y ago
  Here we go : https://iiwiki.us/wiki/Main_Page https://iiwiki.us/wiki/Main_Page
Karen48 4y ago
[dead]
walrus01 4y ago
This person should get together with the random brony who messed with the Scottish language Wikipedia. https://www.google.com/search?q=scots+Wikipedia+brony&oq=scots+Wikipedia+brony&aqs=chrome..69i57.7308j0j7&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDczMDhqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=scots+Wikipedia+brony&oq=sco...
qwerty456127 4y ago
Sounds like a curious work of fiction. I hope they are not going to just delete that.
Asraelite 4y ago
I don't think it's too surprising that stuff like can happen on a non-English Wikipedia. The English one has superb moderation and reliability, but other languages range in quality from pretty good to complete garbage. It's a shame because often the only comprehensive article written about something will be in another language.
- thfuran 4y ago
  >The English one has superb moderation I don't think I've ever seen that claim before. It's... maybe true of some articles.
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    Yeah, the English Wikipedia definitely has similar problems, though they may not be on such a grand scale as this. For instance, I know there's one user who, for at least a decade, has basically been trying to breath life into a new religious concept with a Wikipedia page for it. He's persistent enough, benefits from a relatively frequent typo for sourcing, and his the corner is obscure enough that nothing can be done (given Wikipedia's culture and his persistence).
akolbe 4y ago
It's worth noting that sixthtone is a Chinese state-affiliated website. But the link to the community investigation on Chinese Wikipedia bears them out.
chx 4y ago
Wikipedia has an article on Magyaráb people. They do not exist. First a Hungarian aristocrat was hoodwinked by some locals for money in Egypt in the 1930s, then a Hungarian student spending two semesters Cairo in the 1960s rewarmed the issue to prove his worth and successfully sold himself as an expert of all things Arabic in Hungary -- he never managed to get even a degree -- then finally in the nineties a far right weekly dug up the story for nationalistic purposes. Finally an expedition was sent in 2006-2007 which have found with absolute surety these people do not exist. Their report is linked from wikipedia. I tried to correct the article, I tried to delete the article, it was refused saying it's notorious enough to have an article on Wikipedia ... ... ... seriously? Similarly, Hungarian prehistory on Wikipedia is completely outdated. Most of the "primary sources" it lists are completely unreliable, they were not even written with the intent of being reliable history wise (the The Annals of Fulda and The Annals of St-Bertin being remarkable exceptions). It notes "their reliability ... is suspect" ignoring Tamás Hölbling absolutely tearing them apart in 2010 in his two volume massive source criticism book. They are much closer to a comic book today than a historical book. It completely omits all the remarkable archaeogenetic findings since 2008. It completely ignores an absolutely groundbreaking symposium held in 1999 (they brought together researchers Indo-European and Uralic both archeological and linguistic, this was never done before), second edition can be found at https://www.sgr.fi/sust/SUST242.pdf https://www.sgr.fi/sust/SUST242.pdf . Overall, the Wikipedia article reflects the scientific consensus of the 1970s or so. I tried to fix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Abdallah_Jayhani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Abdallah_Jayhani because Gayhani is incorrect, one spelling which could be used is Ğayhānī (eg https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/islm.1998.75.2.259/html https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/islm.1998.75....) it got reverted with "The other names in the lead are not supposed to have custom alphabets or whatever they're called." Whatever, eh? But hilariously enough, Wikipedia itself has an article on the romanization of Persian and you can check that article and see for yourself that "G" in itself is never used to transliterate a persian letter no matter which scheme you pick... but whatever! I gave up on trying to fix Wikipedia.
- akolbe 4y ago
  Which version of Wikipedia? Do you have a link? (Edit:) Ah, never mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarab_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarab_people
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
It might be worth noting that Sixth Tone is state media overseen by the Shanghai CCP, intended for English speaking audiences.
- gnu8 4y ago
  Very specious of the CCP to think English speaking audiences have any interest in what they have to say.
- kieselguhr_kid 4y ago
  OK but what's the upshot wrt this story? Now that someone knows about its connection to the CCP, does it change how we ought to think about it in any way?
  - z3c0 4y ago
    Yes. If this wasn't state-driven, it'd be a somewhat-humorous prank. If it is state-driven, it becomes a situation straight from 1984, where the protagonist's job is quite literally to rewrite history.
    - kieselguhr_kid 4y ago
      Doesn't the fact that it's reported in state-owned media suggest, although not prove, that it's not state driven? Why would they invite extra scrutiny to their disinformation campaign by publishing an article about it?
      - z3c0 4y ago
        Not really. It's a common strategy called "controlling the narrative" and it has been in play since the early days of public relations and propaganda, largely considered to be pioneered by Ivy Lee[1]. Regardless, I only posed it being state-driven as a hypothetical anyways. But state media reporting on the matter does little-to-nothing towards disproving that hypothesis. [1]: https://pracademy.co.uk/insights/ivy-lee-and-the-origins-of-the-press-release/ https://pracademy.co.uk/insights/ivy-lee-and-the-origins-of-...
hansword 4y ago
All the comments here are positive, the range is from slightly amused to comparing her to Borges (rofl). I didn't like it the moment I heard this, but now contrarian mode has kicked in: Why isn't this destruction of essential information infrastructure? Why isn't this a 'fuck you' to the millions of volunteer hours W is based on? Why isn't this potentially infecting millions of minds with lies? Why isn't this absolutely deplorable? (COI Statement: i am a wikipedia editor for 15+ years, I am a member of my local wikimedia chapter)
- morelisp 4y ago
  > essential information infrastructure lol
- smrtinsert 4y ago
  Probably because it's not merely destruction but creation with volume. As a wikipedia reader I guess I have the luxury to laugh about it knowing stuff like this is eventually discovered and corrected
  - hansword 4y ago
    I have a herd of elephants. I decide one day I get them all really really well fed, and then lead them to the marketplace where they then take a really really big dump on the stalls and the produce and the sellers and the customers. In the end, everything and everyone is just covered, and people are walking knee-deep in elephant poo. That's not merely destruction but creation with volume.
  - akolbe 4y ago
    It's of little help to you if it is corrected a day or decade after you read the article. The thing to remember is to check the cited sources whenever the information is remotely important to you. See https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday_fails/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... or this from Charles Seife: "Wikipedia is like an old and eccentric uncle. He can be a lot of fun—over the years he's seen a lot, and he can tell a great story. He's also no dummy; he's accumulated a lot of information and has some strong opinions about what he's gathered. You can learn quite a bit from him. But take everything he says with a grain of salt. A lot of the things he thinks he knows for sure aren't quite right, or are taken out of context. And when it comes down to it, sometimes he believes things that are a little bit, well, nuts. If it ever matters to you whether something he said is real or fictional, it's crucial to check it out with a more reliable source." —Charles Seife, Virtual Unreality, Appendix, "The top ten dicta of the internet skeptic", Dictum no. 1.
lobocinza 4y ago
Wikipedia isn't perfect, it's the best we got and it can be improved further.
crikeyjoe 4y ago
Not surprising
orangepurple 4y ago
I gave up on wikipedia after adding beautiful photos of relevant chemical reactions I performed during University and watching random accounts remove them for no reason and replace them with... nothing.
- davibu 4y ago
  Maybe because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
  - mardifoufs 4y ago
    Doesn't really apply to pictures especially on wikicommons.
troorl 4y ago
EastSmith 4y ago
"This Tweet links to a China state-affiliated media website. Find out more". This is what I am seing on Twitter linking the above article. A good additional information.
TeeMassive 4y ago
> some Wikipedia editors warned that the incident had “shaken the credibility of the current Chinese Wikipedia as a whole That might have been the goal all along.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
martin1b 4y ago
Which means this can happen to any form of Wikipedia.
DriftRegion 4y ago
Launched on April 6 [2016], garnering some immediate attention from the Western China-watching community, Sixth Tone is a Chinese invention: a media start-up under party oversight that features a slick, attractive website and appealing headlines designed to entice Western readers. It's working. https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-tone-is-chinas-latest-party-approved-outlet-humanizing-news/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-t...
pessimizer 4y ago
I wonder if you could extract all of her contributions as a patch and use one of the deep learning language models to fill in the gaps. Maybe there's a great work hidden in there.
a9h74j 4y ago
Is there an IgNoble prize in Literature?
t_mann 4y ago
While it is admittedly amusing, methinks it's not harmless at all. Vandalism of this sort undermines the legitimacy of information sources more broadly. It was in fact a deliberate tactic of (incidentally Russian) propaganda outlets like RT to mix actual facts with fairly obvious lies and the appearance of a "mainstream" news source. The resulting effect that it had on consumers was that they'd say things like 'yeah, some things there are lies, but there are lies on both sides, you can't really trust any of them'. Or remember QAnon, which also derived its original success from blending authentic information sources with fabrications. I'm not implying that she intended anything of that sort (although some of the other comments suggest that she may have used the fabrications to her advantage in smaller settings), but that her actions could have ended up producing similar results. This is decidedly different from deliberate world-building that takes inspiration from the real and mixes it with the fictional, like what Tolkien did. It would have been exponentially harder to get anyone to care about her stories if they hadn't come with the wikipedia veneer (somewhat sadly, it might be easier for her now that she got global media attention).
la64710 4y ago
How beautiful is her apology . From the article: Zhemao said she made most of her fake entries to fill the gaps left by her first couple of entries she edited. “As the saying goes, in order to tell a lie, you must tell more lies. I was reluctant to delete the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote, but as a result, I wound up losing millions of words, and a circle of academic friends collapsed,” she wrote. “The trouble I’ve caused is hard to make up for, so maybe a permanent ban is the only option. My current knowledge is not enough to make a living, so in the future I will learn a craft, work honestly, and not do nebulous things like this any more.”
ichugwindex 4y ago
Does Wikipedia no longer require you to cite any sources?

326 points by Zuider 4y ago

I hope she gets her own wikipedia page about this

xbar 4y ago

It begs: how many people find themselves weaving webs of lies in places like Wikipedia to keep their personas/identities intact?

leephillips 4y ago
It makes no difference to me, because I don’t read Wikipedia articles. I do use Wikipedia to find references and public domain illustrations, though.
- King-Aaron 4y ago
  okay
- eru 4y ago
  Not sure that's relevant? But those illustrations could be full of lies just the same?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kieselguhr_kid 4y ago

This false history is a literary achievement. Writing such a plausible pseudo-account and convincing so many for so long is impressive. I guess they should take it all down but I'm kind of sad that there aren't any comparable projects (note: I'm aware that there are wikis devoted to creating fictional worlds, but these worlds are rarely historically grounded or plausible)

f38zf5vdt 4y ago
They are preserved in Wikipedia and ranked according to their longevity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wi... There's more or less a competition for them.
- dbtc 4y ago
  I suppose the real way to win would be to add a fake hoax to that page...
chaostheory 4y ago
I’m surprised that she doesn’t publish adapted novels based on her Wikipedia entries. Might be wrong, but both the Twilight series and 50 Shades of Gray series were initially fan fiction pieces by housewives who published their work on blogs. Alternate historical fiction is a very popular genre.
- semanticist 4y ago
  50 Shades of Grey was Twilight fanfic with the 'serial numbers filed off'. I don't think Twilight itself has fanfic in its origin.
  - memsom 4y ago
    I think Twilight was the first novel from the author and she pretty much wrote a transcript, and got a book deal off the back of it. She had little previous experience in writing novels and was just very, very lucky that it happened to all fall in to place... some first time novelists spend years trying to do what she did.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Not to take away from hard work and talent but breaking into the arts in a big way--after which it's at least somewhat easier--must be, what, 90% luck.

googlryas 4y ago

I hope these articles are just mirrored onto a separate wiki site where more people can jump in and elaborate on the alt-world history that Zhemao started. Unfortunately I can't read Chinese, but I do for some reason find fake but entirely real feeling historical accounts very compelling.

pilsetnieks 4y ago
Imagine a traveler from an alternate universe getting fed up by editors constantly rolling back their edit of A to E in Berenstein, and just documenting everything they remember from their prior life.

encryptluks2 4y ago

America has probably rewritten history more times than we'd like to acknowledge. There are some countries that will jail you for questioning the official narratives. I have a feeling America is headed in that direction, one ideology or another.. eventually if you question it you will be labeled some sort of name to elicit the worst reactions from people towards you.

ffhhj 4y ago

What could she do with GPT-3 and DALL-E?

im3w1l 4y ago
Gpt-3 does not have the long-term memory required to create a convincing book-length narrative. Not that that's a guarantee that gpt-4 will be thus limited.

elsonrodriguez 4y ago

There was a similar scandal for the Scots wikipedia: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-us-teenager-wrote-huge-slice-of-scots-wikipedia https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/26/shock-an-aw-...

oefrha 4y ago
I don’t see any similarity between the scandals beyond the surface level one person generating a lot of content on Wikipedia that was later reversed. Your linked article is about some teenager putting up mistranslated garbage. That’s very boring vandalism, notable only due to its scale. TFA is about someone creating a vast collection of plausible-sounding history out of thin air, which is fascinating and arguably more damaging for Wikipedia.
- thih9 4y ago
  In both cases people pretended to be experts (history / scots), it worked and large amount of inappropriate articles stayed public a long time.
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  The Scots Wikipedia issue isn't straightforward at all. For one, considering the sheer effort spent in 170 000 edits over a decade, it's quite possible that the editor was acting in severely misguided good faith. More importantly, it raised questions about the utility and proceedings of Wikimedia sites with low traffic; a substantial discussion took place in an RFC[0] that included proposed audits to prevent future incidents, but nothing really went through other than increased attention to the long-existing Small-Wiki Monitoring Team. And the off-wiki effects...poisoned datasets and damage to the language itself! Perhaps proposals from the RFC will be renewed in light of this, though it's not the same situation as the Chinese Wikipedia isn't really small. It's known for questionable circumstances regarding adminship and other user behaviour, though, and is generally quite insular. So, unsurprising that this story hasn't received much attention outside of Chinese Wikipedia or news. On-wiki, the only pages for it currently are that on zhwiki and a corresponding page on English Wikipedia with a brief summary.[1] Also, enwiki's own newspaper has a more informed article on the Scots incident,[2] also with some discussion (there's also an HN post). By the way, I remember an article or Wikipedia page about how journalism about Wikipedia persistently lacks nuance or understanding of its customs (basically a community-wide Gell-Mann amnesia effect), but can't find it now...anyone happen to just know it? [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_scale_language_inaccuracies_on_the_Scots_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Large_s... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_and_hoaxes_of_Russia_in_2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fabricated_articles_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2020-08-30/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

partiallypro 4y ago

Forget Wikipedia, how much of history in general is largely made up or fluffed.

WalterBright 4y ago
So much of it is that when archaeologists confirm a historical account, it's news. I recall when King Richard's body was dug up under a parking lot, the historians were shocked to discover he really did have a seriously curved spine. They had thought that the accounts of his disability were just propaganda by his enemies.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  No its not news most of the time. The situation you are referencing is an extreme case and that's why it made news, and it happens to be a very well known story with the evidence being literally in the capital city. Seems like you are suffering from an extreme case of survivor bias.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    It seems whenever I have in-depth knowledge of something, and see a journalist's reporting on it, it's all wrong. For example, I was in a building once when a natural gas leak caused the roof to blow off. I recorded 3 local news casts about it later that evening. They all got major facts completely wrong. They said it was a warehouse (it was an office building). They said the building was cleared before it blew (I was in it when it blew, the firemen never suggested I leave). Another one is the 737MAX crashes. The popular press consistently misrepresents and misreports it. (I've posted about that here many times.) And, quite obviously, the mainstream media in the US has been completely misrepresenting current events. Do you think that's a modern phenomenon? I don't. I suspect it has always been happening, it's just that the internet has exposed it.
    - akolbe 4y ago
      "What people outside do not appreciate is that a newspaper is like a soufflé, prepared in a hurry for immediate consumption. This of course is why whenever you read a newspaper account of some event of which you have personal knowledge it is nearly always inadequate or inaccurate. Journalists are as aware as anyone of this defect; it is simply that if the information is to reach as many readers as possible, something less than perfection has often to be accepted." —David E. H. Jones, in New Scientist, Vol. 26 Relevant in this context inasmuch as many Wikipedia articles are based on press sources.

isopod 4y ago

It’s hard to not see this as Borges’ “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” come to life. For a hoax, it’s still an impressive feat of fictional world building. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tl%C3%B6n,_Uqbar,_Orbis_Tertiu...

est 4y ago

> Zhemao published an apology letter on her English Wikipedia account, writing that her motivation was to learn about history. She also wrote that she is in fact a full-time housewife with only a high-school degree. This is not the full story, she originally said the motive was to win online debates with wikipedia references (created by her alias account)

trentgreene 4y ago
What kind of debates?
- est 4y ago
  Keyword: 贴游 or 文游 Scenario simulations based on eu4, hoi4 battles (possibly with mods), both teams would setoff by a historical event, also external events would affect the progress. It's a somewhat popular online sport & sub-culture in China. People go to extremes for historical "accuracy" or just for the sake of it. Tons of memes are generated without people noticing. In this example, Zhemao can claim something like "I should have extra 2000 silver starting at my castle because check out this wikipedia article". She surely have played many games in her favor. Her apology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%E6%8A%98%E6%AF%9B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%E6%8A%98%E6%AF%9B
knighthack 4y ago
Then this article is disingenous, because it did not state it as part of her apology, which would have put some context to it.

livinglist 4y ago

When I was a kid, I enjoyed making up fake history and fake world political map just for fun lol, I also designed flags for each county I came up with. Great time.

hunglee2 4y ago

all history is narrative, with a greater or lesser degree of fidelity to reality. This example should be preserved in some way to remind us of this important fact

throwaway81523 4y ago

I love this. I wish it was in English. It sounds a lot better than the regular Wikipedia.

kthejoker2 4y ago

Borges, Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon, and Danilo Kiš would be proud; what else is the world's historical narrative but an edit war? Such a fantastical lie wrapped around such utter banality; surely this will warrant her own Wikipedia article.

spicybright 4y ago

Michael Scott: "Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information."

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rvieira 4y ago

A "fictional Wikipedia" seems like a nice project. Something that could grow organically from contributors with an effort to cross-link and cross-reference. Is there anything like this?

grenoire 4y ago
SCP Foundation comes to mind https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/ https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/. An entire wiki of a loosely interconnected series of supernatural events and entities. It's very easy to get lost in it.
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  Are they now redirecting (from scp-wiki.net and scpwiki.com) to the Wikidot URL for SEO?
AndrewOMartin 4y ago
Uncyclopedia and SCP come to mind.
shantara 4y ago
A Sci-Fi version of this is Orion's Arm project: https://www.orionsarm.com/ https://www.orionsarm.com/
herbst 4y ago
If you by change understand German, there is https://www.stupidedia.org https://www.stupidedia.org
altilunium 4y ago
Here we go : https://iiwiki.us/wiki/Main_Page https://iiwiki.us/wiki/Main_Page

Karen48 4y ago

[dead]

walrus01 4y ago

This person should get together with the random brony who messed with the Scottish language Wikipedia. https://www.google.com/search?q=scots+Wikipedia+brony&oq=scots+Wikipedia+brony&aqs=chrome..69i57.7308j0j7&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDczMDhqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=scots+Wikipedia+brony&oq=sco...

qwerty456127 4y ago

Sounds like a curious work of fiction. I hope they are not going to just delete that.

Asraelite 4y ago

I don't think it's too surprising that stuff like can happen on a non-English Wikipedia. The English one has superb moderation and reliability, but other languages range in quality from pretty good to complete garbage. It's a shame because often the only comprehensive article written about something will be in another language.

thfuran 4y ago
>The English one has superb moderation I don't think I've ever seen that claim before. It's... maybe true of some articles.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  Yeah, the English Wikipedia definitely has similar problems, though they may not be on such a grand scale as this. For instance, I know there's one user who, for at least a decade, has basically been trying to breath life into a new religious concept with a Wikipedia page for it. He's persistent enough, benefits from a relatively frequent typo for sourcing, and his the corner is obscure enough that nothing can be done (given Wikipedia's culture and his persistence).

akolbe 4y ago

It's worth noting that sixthtone is a Chinese state-affiliated website. But the link to the community investigation on Chinese Wikipedia bears them out.

chx 4y ago

Wikipedia has an article on Magyaráb people. They do not exist. First a Hungarian aristocrat was hoodwinked by some locals for money in Egypt in the 1930s, then a Hungarian student spending two semesters Cairo in the 1960s rewarmed the issue to prove his worth and successfully sold himself as an expert of all things Arabic in Hungary -- he never managed to get even a degree -- then finally in the nineties a far right weekly dug up the story for nationalistic purposes. Finally an expedition was sent in 2006-2007 which have found with absolute surety these people do not exist. Their report is linked from wikipedia. I tried to correct the article, I tried to delete the article, it was refused saying it's notorious enough to have an article on Wikipedia ... ... ... seriously? Similarly, Hungarian prehistory on Wikipedia is completely outdated. Most of the "primary sources" it lists are completely unreliable, they were not even written with the intent of being reliable history wise (the The Annals of Fulda and The Annals of St-Bertin being remarkable exceptions). It notes "their reliability ... is suspect" ignoring Tamás Hölbling absolutely tearing them apart in 2010 in his two volume massive source criticism book. They are much closer to a comic book today than a historical book. It completely omits all the remarkable archaeogenetic findings since 2008. It completely ignores an absolutely groundbreaking symposium held in 1999 (they brought together researchers Indo-European and Uralic both archeological and linguistic, this was never done before), second edition can be found at https://www.sgr.fi/sust/SUST242.pdf https://www.sgr.fi/sust/SUST242.pdf . Overall, the Wikipedia article reflects the scientific consensus of the 1970s or so. I tried to fix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Abdallah_Jayhani https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Abdallah_Jayhani because Gayhani is incorrect, one spelling which could be used is Ğayhānī (eg https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/islm.1998.75.2.259/html https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/islm.1998.75....) it got reverted with "The other names in the lead are not supposed to have custom alphabets or whatever they're called." Whatever, eh? But hilariously enough, Wikipedia itself has an article on the romanization of Persian and you can check that article and see for yourself that "G" in itself is never used to transliterate a persian letter no matter which scheme you pick... but whatever! I gave up on trying to fix Wikipedia.

akolbe 4y ago
Which version of Wikipedia? Do you have a link? (Edit:) Ah, never mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarab_people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magyarab_people

AbrahamParangi 4y ago

It might be worth noting that Sixth Tone is state media overseen by the Shanghai CCP, intended for English speaking audiences.

gnu8 4y ago
Very specious of the CCP to think English speaking audiences have any interest in what they have to say.
kieselguhr_kid 4y ago
OK but what's the upshot wrt this story? Now that someone knows about its connection to the CCP, does it change how we ought to think about it in any way?
- z3c0 4y ago
  Yes. If this wasn't state-driven, it'd be a somewhat-humorous prank. If it is state-driven, it becomes a situation straight from 1984, where the protagonist's job is quite literally to rewrite history.
  - kieselguhr_kid 4y ago
    Doesn't the fact that it's reported in state-owned media suggest, although not prove, that it's not state driven? Why would they invite extra scrutiny to their disinformation campaign by publishing an article about it?
    - z3c0 4y ago
      Not really. It's a common strategy called "controlling the narrative" and it has been in play since the early days of public relations and propaganda, largely considered to be pioneered by Ivy Lee[1]. Regardless, I only posed it being state-driven as a hypothetical anyways. But state media reporting on the matter does little-to-nothing towards disproving that hypothesis. [1]: https://pracademy.co.uk/insights/ivy-lee-and-the-origins-of-the-press-release/ https://pracademy.co.uk/insights/ivy-lee-and-the-origins-of-...

hansword 4y ago

All the comments here are positive, the range is from slightly amused to comparing her to Borges (rofl). I didn't like it the moment I heard this, but now contrarian mode has kicked in: Why isn't this destruction of essential information infrastructure? Why isn't this a 'fuck you' to the millions of volunteer hours W is based on? Why isn't this potentially infecting millions of minds with lies? Why isn't this absolutely deplorable? (COI Statement: i am a wikipedia editor for 15+ years, I am a member of my local wikimedia chapter)

morelisp 4y ago
> essential information infrastructure lol
smrtinsert 4y ago
Probably because it's not merely destruction but creation with volume. As a wikipedia reader I guess I have the luxury to laugh about it knowing stuff like this is eventually discovered and corrected
- hansword 4y ago
  I have a herd of elephants. I decide one day I get them all really really well fed, and then lead them to the marketplace where they then take a really really big dump on the stalls and the produce and the sellers and the customers. In the end, everything and everyone is just covered, and people are walking knee-deep in elephant poo. That's not merely destruction but creation with volume.
- akolbe 4y ago
  It's of little help to you if it is corrected a day or decade after you read the article. The thing to remember is to check the cited sources whenever the information is remotely important to you. See https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday_fails/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday... or this from Charles Seife: "Wikipedia is like an old and eccentric uncle. He can be a lot of fun—over the years he's seen a lot, and he can tell a great story. He's also no dummy; he's accumulated a lot of information and has some strong opinions about what he's gathered. You can learn quite a bit from him. But take everything he says with a grain of salt. A lot of the things he thinks he knows for sure aren't quite right, or are taken out of context. And when it comes down to it, sometimes he believes things that are a little bit, well, nuts. If it ever matters to you whether something he said is real or fictional, it's crucial to check it out with a more reliable source." —Charles Seife, Virtual Unreality, Appendix, "The top ten dicta of the internet skeptic", Dictum no. 1.

lobocinza 4y ago

Wikipedia isn't perfect, it's the best we got and it can be improved further.

crikeyjoe 4y ago

Not surprising

orangepurple 4y ago

I gave up on wikipedia after adding beautiful photos of relevant chemical reactions I performed during University and watching random accounts remove them for no reason and replace them with... nothing.

davibu 4y ago
Maybe because of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
- mardifoufs 4y ago
  Doesn't really apply to pictures especially on wikicommons.

troorl 4y ago

EastSmith 4y ago

"This Tweet links to a China state-affiliated media website. Find out more". This is what I am seing on Twitter linking the above article. A good additional information.

TeeMassive 4y ago

> some Wikipedia editors warned that the incident had “shaken the credibility of the current Chinese Wikipedia as a whole That might have been the goal all along.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

martin1b 4y ago

Which means this can happen to any form of Wikipedia.

DriftRegion 4y ago

Launched on April 6 [2016], garnering some immediate attention from the Western China-watching community, Sixth Tone is a Chinese invention: a media start-up under party oversight that features a slick, attractive website and appealing headlines designed to entice Western readers. It's working. https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-tone-is-chinas-latest-party-approved-outlet-humanizing-news/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/china-explained-sixth-t...

pessimizer 4y ago

I wonder if you could extract all of her contributions as a patch and use one of the deep learning language models to fill in the gaps. Maybe there's a great work hidden in there.

a9h74j 4y ago

Is there an IgNoble prize in Literature?

t_mann 4y ago

While it is admittedly amusing, methinks it's not harmless at all. Vandalism of this sort undermines the legitimacy of information sources more broadly. It was in fact a deliberate tactic of (incidentally Russian) propaganda outlets like RT to mix actual facts with fairly obvious lies and the appearance of a "mainstream" news source. The resulting effect that it had on consumers was that they'd say things like 'yeah, some things there are lies, but there are lies on both sides, you can't really trust any of them'. Or remember QAnon, which also derived its original success from blending authentic information sources with fabrications. I'm not implying that she intended anything of that sort (although some of the other comments suggest that she may have used the fabrications to her advantage in smaller settings), but that her actions could have ended up producing similar results. This is decidedly different from deliberate world-building that takes inspiration from the real and mixes it with the fictional, like what Tolkien did. It would have been exponentially harder to get anyone to care about her stories if they hadn't come with the wikipedia veneer (somewhat sadly, it might be easier for her now that she got global media attention).

la64710 4y ago

How beautiful is her apology . From the article: Zhemao said she made most of her fake entries to fill the gaps left by her first couple of entries she edited. “As the saying goes, in order to tell a lie, you must tell more lies. I was reluctant to delete the hundreds of thousands of words I wrote, but as a result, I wound up losing millions of words, and a circle of academic friends collapsed,” she wrote. “The trouble I’ve caused is hard to make up for, so maybe a permanent ban is the only option. My current knowledge is not enough to make a living, so in the future I will learn a craft, work honestly, and not do nebulous things like this any more.”

ichugwindex 4y ago

Does Wikipedia no longer require you to cite any sources?